Royal Tragedienne

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6626, 12 August 1931, Page 10

Royal Tragedienne

Who: EMPRESS ALEXANDRA FEODOROVNA. Where: Russia. When: Nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

Why famous: As wife of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, she played a leading part in one of the most horrible tragedies of modern times. It was as a German princess of the house of Hesse that she was married to the young Tsar or Emperor; but her mother had been English, Princess' Alice who was a daughter of Queen Victoria, and Alexandra was educated in England. However, once committed in allegiance to her adopted country, she became more Russian than the Russians; in spite ot which, it is said that she was always a little vaguely distrusted by her husband’s subjects.

Her fundamental mistake was that, while the times fairly cried out for reasonable reforms, the Tsarina brought all her powers to bear upon her support of the most reactionary measures, the most extreme belief in tho ancient theory of ‘ ‘ the divine right of kings. ’' By disposition both impressionable and highly sensitive, even inclined to be hysterical, sho came to place reliance upon persons of evil repute, notably upon the monk Rasputin. That peasant had gained his jrower over the Tsarina through his protestations of benefit by his ministrations to the little Tsarevitch tho idol of his mother and the heir to the throne of all the Russias. Hence, as Marie Antoinette was, in the Prance of a century and a half earlier, responsible in a degree for her royal husband’s ill-advised actions, so was Alexandra Feodorovna guided most unwisely in the choice of her husband’s policies and in the choice of such ministers as should carry them out, She would have no concessions to the modern spirit of reform. More and more her husband subsided into passive acquiescence, while the strong-willed Tsarina dismissed ministers and directed events along channels nicely calculated to produce catastrophe. Exhortations foil upon deaf ears. She knew fier course and she held to it. However, it is now generally believed tfiat she was not, as lias sometimes been asserted, a German sympathiser during the World War nor a betrayer of Russian secrets to the Kaiser.

The dire circumstances of the Russian Revolution of 1918, with the fate which it held for the Tsar and Tsarina, their son and daughters, is too recent and too painful to require rehearsal. There remains the vision of a most unhappy Empress and mother—a woman of rare beauty and of a greatly intended devotion to the land of her husband —but a woman in whose deep eyes lurked what someone has described as ‘‘a look of tragic surprise.”